(THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF) DAVID COPPERFIELD (2019)

While ‘Color-Blind’ casting has long been common on stage (half a century or so), it still can create a useful stir (and commercial buzz) when seen thru film’s de facto realism.  Ergo BRIDGERTON.  So why not Dickens?  No problem at all in writer/director Armando Iannucci’s adaptation, though perhaps less ‘Color-Blind’ than ‘Pro-Diversity,’ a slightly different policy.  And yet this ‘meta’-Dickens COPPERFIELD is almost as dead-on-arrival as Roman Polanski’s ultra-traditional OLIVER TWIST was in 2005.  Opening as a stage reading by the grown Copperfield, an act the real Dickens thrived at, we jump back into the story.  ‘Jump’ the operative word as Iannucci’s hand-held camera never stops nervously thrusting, infecting his cast with a bad case of St. Vitus dance, and leaving the marvelously ‘rhymed’ plot to tumble out in hit-and-miss fashion, indecipherable to those not already familiar with it.*  It represents a serious step back from the narrative advancements & confident technical display of Iannucci’s last, THE DEATH OF STALIN/’17.  We’re left with a few good (hammy) turns (emboldened Tilda Swinton; dapper Dev Patel; curse-coifed Ben Whishaw) that still pale beside the miraculous cast of the old George Cukor/David O Selznick 1935 beauty.  (Comic geniuses W.C. Fields & Edna May Oliver only the start, with Basil Rathbone, Freddie Bartholomew, Roland Young, and the astoundingly odd Lennox Pawle among many others.)  Anyway, how to trust any version that drops ‘Barkis is willing.’?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Next to OLIVER TWIST, COPPERFIELD may be Dickens’ most adapted novel.  Besides the 1935 film (with a very generous running time for the period of 2'10", also the only one to make Dora’s appeal understandable), the 1999 BBC mini-series with Daniel Radcliffe, Maggie Smith & Bob Hoskins holds up nicely.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/david-copperfield-1935.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *And it’s belatedly occurred to me that this WriteUp, just like the film, assumes a more-or-less complete knowledge of the book to make sense of!